Kick-drum Friday night
Afternoon mix-tape:
Cornelius, Fantasma.J Dilla, Donuts. The Back Room, Vol. 1.
Where are all my houseguests? Now taking requests.
Today's disruptive juxtaposition is
I saw this on rising around 6 A.M. and thought the following: "Funky Soul Medina!" You tell me why.
"We all need someone to look at us"
That's Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As notions go, it seems like a key connector between Martin Buber's I & Thou and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and here's why: the unnamed narrator in the latter seems so uncertain of herself as an agent in the I-Thou relationship she has with precocious tots Flora and Miles that she begins to invest the "sights" she has of former employees (and lovers) Mr. Quint and Miss Jessup with way more apprehension than would a person with a more developed sense of self. In other words, the narrator has a larger inclination to invent or embellish the ghost-sights of Quint and Jessup because she needs an It to supplement her imperfectly established relationship with the kids; she substitutes a fanciful I-It for the I-Thou she has with her young student charges. Or alternatively, the narrator sets up an Us-Them to compensate for the flawed I-Thou she has with Flora & Miles. (Reminds me of an ongoing conversation two college pals would have about chicks and dudes, but that's neither here nor there.) Buber scholars are more than welcome to chime in: I'm new to the guy.
Weather haiku
These triple digits! Air ducts, shoddily designed, Bring in the desert.
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But then again, even mentioning the weather in this town's like mentioning the traffic on L.I.: since it's so par for the course, it marks one as new.
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Donne & Hopkins on the mind. Batter my heart, three-personed God, sprung rhythm and the like. Which might stem, also, from the heat.
Don't think Commie thoughts, don't think Commie thoughts
Visible from the new digs in central Las Vegas, the terrifying black-and-gray edifice of the World Market Center resembles nothing so much as the Ministry of Love in George Orwell's 1984, in which enemies of the state are sequestered from the proles and right-thinking members of the Party for years at a time, and all manner of psychological puppetry goes on in windowless rooms until the unlucky resister recants and begins to love Big Brother. I like to think that the thing you must begin to love within these walls is Capitalism itself. Not the dollar, not selling or buying, but the whole system in toto. A sort of affection factory for the notion of doubling and tripling one's money.
